On riaa.com, the Website of the Recording Industry Assn. of America, there's a headline that reads: "RIAA Anti-Piracy Efforts Lead to 17 Years for Music Counterfeiter." It's the story of Randy Lee Williamson of Plainview, Texas. Williamson is indeed doing 17 years in state prison, but not, as the RIAA claims, for "conspiracy and smuggling charges related to criminal copyright and trademark infringement and other crimes." According to the Plainview Daily Herald, Williamson plead guilty in part because charges of criminal copyright infringement and dealing in counterfeit labels were dropped.Williamson's sentence relates to conspiracy, possession of child pornography (which does not mean Britney Spears albums), possession of obscene material (which does not mean RIAA warning labels) and soliciting sex from an underage girl. But the RIAA wants visitors to its Website to believe that anyone who trades in recorded music in ways the record labels don't like will do long stretches of hard time, so it just flat-out lies.
The RIAA lies all the time. Millions of people now believe that Internet file-sharing makes musicians poor (even though it might make them rich), that money received from record sales goes to artists (although it seldom does), and that if file-swapping continues, we'll have no more recorded music (although it really means we'll have no more record companies). The RIAA lies baldly all the time - for instance, when it denies that threatening letters sent to universities about students caching .mp3s on their computers mean what they say.
The RIAA operates in the spirit of the industry it represents. Twenty years ago, a friend of mine helped write the computer program that tabulated the Billboard chart. But the tabulated results were not to be sent to the magazine's headquarters in New York; they were sent to an employee in Los Angeles to be "adjusted."
Ten years ago, Billboard linked up with Soundscan, which changed the face of the charts by acquiring hard data on actual record sales from the computers of about 18,000 American record-sellers. The result is the least respectable types of music, rap, metal, alt-rock, have become clearly the most commercial forms of music in America. They probably were before but it usually didn't show on the charts, in part because those "adjustments" reflected other priorities on the part of the record labels that paid to have them made.
A fair count still isn't the priority of the RIAA record companies. The labels have figured out how to cheat Soundscan, according to a July 13, story by Chuck Philips of the Los Angeles Times. Record companies hire independent marketing consultants who pay record stores to cheat in their Soundscan reporting by scanning the same CD several times. The payoff is in "free goods," which are of course free of royalties too (although the marketing firm's fee is probably deducted from the artist's royalty account).
Philips names no album titles, record companies or stores. He does say that cheating can add ten chart positions, "which could be enough to get a CD into the coveted top 10." Indeed, the difference between No.10 and No.12 often is only a few hundred copies.
There is now no reason for anyone to give credibility to the RIAA, a front for liars, cheats and thieves. We can only hope that journalists, judges and politicians remember this the next time the RIAA slithers onstage to whine.
(c) Copyright 2000 Dave Marsh
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